What are the responsibilities of the creative and cultural industries?

Author

Date posted

January 31, 2009

If you don’t know him already, Nick Cohen is a journalist who writes mainly for The Observer. As a very anti-trendy leftie, I see him, in his exposure of cant and hypocrisy, as a modern Orwell (that’s praise in my book). He has a new book due out, ‘Waiting for the Etonians‘, in which he laments the decline of liberal values in the UK – mostly thanks to liberals themselves betraying the principals they have traditionally held dear.

What caught my eye in an extract published in last Sunday’s Observer was a sideswipe at what he calls the cultural industries and their ‘failure’ to engage with the ‘condition of society’ in recent years.

Against the backdrop of the ‘boom’ years of the last decade he suggests that media tended to concentrate on the good fortunes of many, ignoring the many casualties, whose numbers were growing even before the economic downturn. In particular, ‘Journalists, entertainers and artists were hopeless at dramatising their suffering, and many revelled in it’. He continues:

By the 21st century, the politically correct had placed racism and homophobia off limits. The culture industries compensated by turning on underprivileged whites with all the suspicion and condescension they displayed towards the old upper class. Media executives commissioned shows such as Little Britain and Shameless, in which the white poor were white trash: stupid teenagers who got pregnant without a thought; alcoholic fathers with delinquent children who wallowed in drugs and sex. which the taxpaying viewers could enjoy only in moderation because they had to go to work in the morning. The poor were the grasping inhabitants of a parasite paradise, scrounging off the cozened middle classes in television comedy, or freaks to be mocked on the British versions of the Jerry Springer Show.

There was truth in the stereotype – for there is truth in all stereotypes. Comedy producers could point to estates with families that had not worked for generations, living at other people’s expense on the edge of the law. The producers of reality shows could say they did not force their freaks to go on air. Contestants and guests willingly played their parts, hamming up their performances to secure fleeting fame.

The failure of the BBC and Channel 4 was not their abandonment of pity for the victims of an increasingly harsh financial system, but their lack of imagination. They did not have the intelligence to realise the fragility of their and their scoffing viewers’ lives. They never said, “Don’t laugh too loud because one day you may be poor too.” In the broadcasters’ world, the gap between living in the house with the Northern Rock mortgage and being on the council house waiting list was unbridgeable. The poor were poor because of their own depravity and weakness. They had chosen to be the way they were. The idea that there would soon come a time when hundreds of thousands would face penury through no fault of their own was beyond them.

The high arts occasionally played the same games with race and class. In general, though, literary writers and filmmakers had little interest in deprivation and wealth, and failed to see the connections between the two. Raised in public-sector families, educated in universities and working in academia, they were the artistic equivalents of Westminster’s political class: narrow professionals with few experiences of life beyond their trade. No writer is obliged to write a state-of-England novel, but so few wanted to that the critic DJ Taylor complained in 2007 of “the fatal detachment of the modern ‘literary’ writer from the society that he or she presumes to reflect”.

The markets were on the longest run in history. The decisions made in Canary Wharf and Wall Street affected everyone, high and low. But Taylor concluded that when it came to talking about “globalisation, the rise of the international money markets, the creation of a virtual economic world stratospherically removed from the processes of ordinary life – the number of contemporary writers capable of understanding their complexity, much less rendering them into fictional form, could be accommodated behind a very small table”.

There was no Dickens for the 21st century to bring to life the stunted aspirations and stultifying fears of the leveraged economy. Indebtedness became an everyday misery, quietly endured by stragglers at the circus that had briefly enchanted, then left them behind. You found them lamenting their folly and cursing the banks on radio phone-ins or in internet chatrooms rather than on the Booker shortlist or television schedules.

Some of this argument has been articulated before, namely the scapegoating of the white working class for various social ills. I’d tend to agree with that argument to some degree (the scapegoating, not the idea that this group are in any way responsible for the totality of social ills). However, against the continuing faith in the ‘cultural and creative industries’ as an economic force, it is unusual to find such a blanket critique of content and responsibilities.

Of course, here Cohen focuses on those CCIs most visibly concerned with representations but I wonder whether or not this argument has a bearing on the kinds of CCI we are concerned with at Interactive Cultures and in what ways?

Category

Tags

Comments comment

Interesting piece Paul. There’s a piece to be written about “Raised in working-class families, educated in universities and working in academia.” Academia isn’t half as rarified as suggested above but that isn’t really Cohen’s target.

I think there’s a couple of culprits to blame for where we are now and in particular for this tendency to demonise the working classes:
1. Cultural Studies. Wasn’t part of CS’s mission to bring a greater appreciation of the plurality of voices in society? To develop an appreciation of working class culture in particular and to chart its gradual erosion so that we could sufficiently politicised to do something about it? How is it that the radicals of the 1970s haven’t taken that mission through to their powerful jobs in public life: in the media, in public office, in academia?

2. Public Service Broadcasting. PSB was reinvented into something much more radical and vibrant in the 1980s by Channel 4. Fuelled by those radicals mentioned above of course but then it seemed to drift. The thoughtful, provocative stuff gave way to a desire to wrap PSB up in more cosy packages that subjected the vulnerable and the working classes to a kind of back-handed paternalism even more patronising that Reith’s version of it. What happened? Did that first wave of commissioners realise the politics at the next level up became one of negotiation and compromise rather than direct action? Shifting PSB to digital, the current ‘radical’ option, might well be its death-knell, led by a new generation for whom Cultural Studies was the 20% they had to get past in order to play with the cameras.

Its no surprise that cultural and creative industries seems so uninspiring; they’re firmly part of the establishment and of the economy so the only push is to sustain growth at any cost, not to be distinctive and certainly not political. Interestingly I was at a meeting in the City the other day where there was some discussion about the problems of bringing the creative sector into more formal structures and the danger therefore of the sector losing its radical ‘edge’. That POV came from the City representative; the creative rep couldn’t see the problem….

In response to Dave’s reflections on the impact cultural studies has or has not had through the ‘radicals of the 70s’ taking their ideas into more practical environments – in the media & other creative industries in particular , I’d like to refer to Angela McRobbie’s writing. Back in the late 90s, she published a range of essays in a book entitled In The Culture Society (you might be familiar with it) in which one of the issues she explores is how academics relate to political debates outside academia. She suggests that dominant disciplines such as post structuralism have resulted in an opportunity to have a more international debate focused on ‘subjectivity, difference and meaning’ but ultimately less involved in practical debates. I realise that these issues may have moved on since McRobbie published, but I use this simply to say that the space between academia and the ‘real’ world of policy, media and creative industries is a difficult one. While some of the radical ideas which came out of Birmingham Cultural Studies in the 70s and 80s shaped a wider theoretical debate to what extent did they impact on local issues? I might just be demonstrating my lack of knowledge here but isn’t about time we developed a theoretical approach which engages with academia and local CI and doesn’t avoid political debate?

by Annette Naudin on February 18, 2009 at 4:26 pm

To be fair to those who came out of CCCS in Birmingham whom I know, have read (or experienced in terms of other cultural output), and have met: many who are active and have made changes in academia and indeed in the ‘real’ world.
Their ‘theory’ has been translated into action in challenging the habitual dispositions of a sexist, racist nature that characterised social attitudes (filtering into the CCI of course, in education too). This was writ large in a number of projects – notably the early days of C4…hmmm.

AN’s post seems to call for some kind of new engagement which is, in some ways, politicised beyond some kind of box-ticking exercise of ‘right-on-ness’ or aligned to the rather anodyne (but pernicious) banality of contemporary party politics.

How can academics/theorists speak without fork-tongues with a wider constituency? How are theoretical perspectives relevant and revealing? This isn’t just our responsibility but, inasmuch as we are concerned with those in the CCI, that too of workers and funders who must be willing to engage in informed dialogues about what they do and their responsibilities.

Speaking as a native of Birmingham here, I’ve been repeatedly struck by our tradition of anti-intellectualism (remember what they did to the original Lunar Society?) and how this characterises notable absences/silences as well as some pronouncements amongst those in the CCIs and local agencies (see this report for instance:http://steflewandowski.com/2008/11/big-city-plan-public-consultation-whos-in/)